Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation

· Ballantine Books
5.0
5 reviews
Ebook
400
Pages
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Multi-award-winning Hannah Gadsby broke comedy with their show Nanette. In this “enthralling” (The Washington Post) memoir, they take us through the defining moments in their life and their powerful decision to tell the truth—no matter the cost.

Don’t miss Hannah Gadsby’s Something Special, now streaming!

“Hannah is a Promethean force, a revolutionary talent. This hilarious, touching, and sometimes tragic book is all about where their fires were lit.”—Emma Thompson

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Vulture

“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself,” Hannah Gadsby declared in their show Nanette, a scorching critique of the way society conducts public debates about marginalized communities. 
 
Gadsby grew up as the youngest of five children in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. After moving to mainland Australia and receiving a degree in art history, they found themselves adrift, working itinerant jobs and enduring years of isolation punctuated by homophobic and sexual violence. When Gadsby was twenty-seven, a friend encouraged them to enter a stand-up competition. They won, and so began their career in comedy.
 
Gadsby became well known for their self-disparaging humor, but in 2015, as Australia debated the legality of same-sex marriage, they started to question this mode of storytelling, beginning to work on a show that would transform their career and would become “the most-talked-about, written-about, shared-about comedy act in years” (The New York Times). 

Harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby’s growth as a queer person, their ever-evolving relationship with comedy, and their struggle with late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, finally arriving at the backbone of Nanette: the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.

Ratings and reviews

5.0
5 reviews

About the author

Hannah Gadsby stopped stand-up comedy in its tracks with their multi-award-winning show Nanette, which played to sold-out houses in Australia, the UK, and New York. Its launch on Netflix, and subsequent Emmy and Peabody wins, took Nanette (and Hannah) to the world. Hannah’s difficult second album (which was also their eleventh solo show) was named Douglas, after their dog. Hannah walked Douglas around the world, selling out and scoring another Emmy nomination. Before all of this, Hannah appeared as a character called Hannah in Please Like Me (Hulu) and toured their native Australia and the UK as a stand-up comedian. They made art documentaries and did plenty of other things over the course of more than a decade in comedy, but that will do for now.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.